There is increasing demand to develop a more personalised approach to diagnosis and treatment regimes for patients, such as those with cancer, so that treatment offered is based on the knowledge that it will be effective. The current “one size fits all” approach should not be applied to care and treatment when the tools that are now available can target the individual.

EFFORT is a UK NERC funded research project running from January 2011 to January 2014. It is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between geoscientists (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh), rock physicists (Department of Earth Sciences, UCL), and informaticians (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh).

The Edinburgh Data-Intensive Machine (EDIM1) is a compute-cluster for data-intensive research and experimentation. The product of a joint collaboration between the School of Informatics and EPCC, funded jointly by EPSRC and the University of Edinburgh, EDIM1 is designed to be more ‘Amdahl- balanced’ than existing data-intensive machines insofar as it offers the greatest possible capacity for applications to benefit from the parallelisation of any components where potential for such exists.

From the ENVRI Description of Work: "Frontier environmental research increasingly depends on a wide range of data and advanced capabilities to process and analyse them. The ENVRI project, 'Common Operations of Environmental Research Infrastructures' is a collaboration in the ESFRI Environment Cluster, with support from ICT experts, to develop common e-science components and services for their facilities. The results will speed up the construction of these infrastructures and will allow scientists to use the data and software from each facility to enable multi-disciplinary science."

The Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) is an open-source, cloud-based infrastructure that allows scientists to manage, analyze, integrate and share medium to large size scientific datasets.

The OSDC PIRE project aims to narrow the growing gap between the capability of modern scientific instruments to produce data and the ability of researchers to control and examine the data in a reliable and timely manner.

The inherent limits to the predictability of brittle failure events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are important, unknown, and much debated. We will establish techniques to determine what this limit is in the ideal case of controlled laboratory tests, for the first time in real-time, prospective mode, meaning before failure has occurred.

Modern cell and developmental biology and the now-established domain of systems biology use quantitative imaging methods to measure the location, dynamics and interaction of molecules in fixed and living cells, and at increasingly high spatial and temporal resolution. Quantitative imaging depends on the development, delivery, and use of sophisticated image processing and analysis algorithms. The availability of these data analysis tools is commonly cited as a major bottleneck in scientific discovery.

Scotland has a major unmet need in translational imaging expertise to support its substantial strengths in medical research, including drug discovery. The initial SINAPSE Pooling investment in neuroimaging research increased expertise at all levels, in MRI, PET/SPECT, radiochemistry and functional imaging, and established an exemplary PhD programme and Imaging Trans-Skills Course.

Researchers today from many different disciplines rely on software to carry out high quality research. This software must be able to serve the changing needs of the researcher to remain relevant. It must be able to change, adapt, and travel with the researcher on the journey of exploration, innovation and discovery which embodies leading research.